sanctuary

Monday, September 26, 2016

So far we simply have not
been prepared to accept the revolutionary implications of our own
findings, and even when we do we are reluctant to voice such thoughts
openly … many are ultimately choosing to censor their own
research.

One number in particular
always stands out for me. That number is 0.00004. It represents the
time we humans have existed on our planet compared to Earth's total
age. Earth is 4.543 billion years old.

Modern humans have been
around for approximately 200,000 years. Perhaps 6 or 7 million years
ago our distant ancestors, possibly in what is present day Chad, and
the chimpanzee separated from our common ancestor Sahelanthropus
Tchandensis (see “Remembering uncle sah,” May 7,2013).

Only 92 elements make up ALL
of life on this planet. We humans today are quite likely breathing
the same air that the dinosaurs breathed 100 million years ago.
Scientists believe, in a general sense, that any given species of
plant and animal, vertebrate or invertebrate on average lasts around
10 million years. We Homo sapiens (sapiens) are animal vertebrates.
How long do you think humankind will manage to hang on? How much
misery and destruction to all life are we capable of leaving in our
wake?

Brief Explanation of
Weather and Climate

The numbers but which ones

The number of importance at
the moment for government policy makers and climate scientist is 2
degrees Celsius.

While it may be of more
significance politically than scientifically, it is a serious marker
that the international community has set as a temperature standard in
an attempt to avoid a global warming disaster, which in the worst
case scenario could conceivably result in human extinction, possibly
sooner than what was previously imagined. The objective is to keep
global warming increases under 2 degrees Celsius.(A temperature of 2
degrees Celsius is 35.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Several years ago the number
400 ppm was well known to policy makers and climate scientists. It
represented parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.The objective was to keep CO2 emissions in the atmosphere under 400
ppm.

The last monitoring station
that crossed the threshold occurred in the Antarctic on May 23 of
this year. What happens in Beijing, New York or Paris doesn't stay
there. This is the first time in 4 million years that carbon
emissions have risen above 400 ppm and remained there.

Since the beginning of the
Neolithic era, which began some 10,000 years ago global temperatures
fluctuated only about 1 degree Celsius. This is the period when human
civilization got underway, beginning with human settlements,
agriculture and what we call culture. We are now moving into the
unknown. Since the 1800s we have warmed 1 degree Celsius.

All the truth and only the
truth so help me....

Kevin Anderson, a respected
climate scientist, believes many scientists are indulging in a form
of self-censorship; in other words, they are producing reports that
are “politically” acceptable, because the reality may be far
worse than government policy makers, corporations and the public want
to hear at the present time.

The first video clip is a
short interview with Anderson at the climate talks in Paris in
December 2015 and the second video is a lecture that Anderson gave in
September 2015. It is very much about the numbers and the possible
consequences.

Monday, September 19, 2016

I live in Kansas City,
Missouri at the present time, an increasingly vibrant and diverse
medium-sized city in the middle of the United States. Unfortunately,
my fair city is in Missouri, a state whose heart seems to reside in
the Old Confederacy and the OK Corral rather than the 21st
century.

Missouri brings to mind the
line from Franz Kafka's novel The Trial published in 1925: “It's
only because of their stupidity that they're able to be so sure of
themselves.”

The Missouri state
legislature, overriding the governor's veto, has recently approved a
bill, which expands our “concealed carry” law. Now, no gun permit
is required, no criminal background check needed and no firearms
training deemed necessary. We're just all lusty, red-blooded yeomen,
you know, like Thomas Jefferson praised in the 18th
century.

Of course Missouri is as
well a major contributor to the expanding dead zone in the Gulf of
Mexico, because of unregulated farming pollution runoff in the
Mississippi river. Welcome to Missouri. Give us your tired and your
deplorables.

Speaking of those
“deplorables,” Hillary Clinton supposedly made a political
mistake when she spoke of the Trump's supporters. Okay, 50% might be
high. Let's say it's only 45 percent that are kind of deplorable,
even though some polls have claimed that something like 60 percent of
the White People's Cult believe that President Obama is a Muslim or
not born in the U.S. or the founder of Isis—well whatever. Time to
buy my gun(s) and protect my castle.

Tuesday, September 13, 2016

The twenty-first century
is not characterized by the search for new-ness, but by the
proliferations of nostalgias.

(Svetlana Boym, late
Russian-American philologist)

In the charged atmosphere
of the populist insurgency, spectacle lynchings sent a message: Stay
out of any politics that would divide whites and weaken white
supremacy.

(Age of Betrayal
1865-1890, by Jack Beatty)

Why has it seemed so
improbable to so many people that Donald Trump, the repulsive,
narcissistic buffoon, could very well become the next president of
the United States? Trump might well be the inevitable outcome—the
poster child--of a country desperate to fail.

It's called American history

No, it's not new at all,
regardless of whether or not assorted politicians and
info-entertainers on television today purport to be presenting some
fresh insight to an oftentimes uninformed electorate. The election
year 2016 in the United States is depressingly familiar. We can,
however, still make an attempt not to—once again—do the same
stupid.

The Populist movement of the
1880s and 1890s had many themes familiar to us today, including the
demands for economic fairness, equality and the end of political
corruption. The movement exploded across the mid-west and the south
in the 1880s brought on, as Supreme Court Justice John Marshall
Harlan recalled, by a “deep feeling of unrest.”

Small farmers and the
relatively poor were especially hard hit by economic forces they had
little control over and by decisions made in New York and Washington
that more often than not had virtually nothing to do with the needs
of the American people as a whole.

But by fearlessness,
organizing and an education campaign, which started out in a remote
part of Texas, the Populist movement became arguably the greatest
mass movement in American history. By 1891 they were a powerful
political force, quite capable of challenging the oligarchy, the
status quo and possibly capturing the White House. By 1900, however,
the Populist movement was virtually finished.

White racism, the sickness
that was built into the founding of the United States, was certainly
a major reason for the eventual collapse of the Populist movement.
White Southerners especially were ultimately incapable of getting
beyond their, uh, “cultural” heritage. The year 1892, when the
Populist movement was at its pinnacle, was also the worst year for
lynchings since 1868.

Once again white people,
especially the rural poor and the powerless in the south, responded
to the various “dog whistles,” employed so skillfully by the
likes of the robber baron Jay Gould in New York or by some wealthy,
politically connected plantation owner in Dixie.

The W.P.C., aka the white
people's cult aka formerly known as the Republican party

The comedian Samantha Bee
once referred to the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as a
“chinless dildo.” While McConnell can easily claim the mantel of
mediocrity, he reflects reasonably well the cult, of which he is a
leading member, and which the Donald, for the time being, is also an
“honored” member.

The Karl Marx coloring book

In fairness to Karl Marx,
Susan Sarandon and many of my Progressive friends, the times they are
most certainly changing. WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE! Er, which
workers might that be? There are the self-employed. Not all of them
are rich lawyers and doctors that have set up their single-person
corporation. And what about the growing number of temporary
employees? They're workers. And yes, the monster under the bed. It's
called automation and likely to grow.

The not-so-secret
observation is that probably a majority of these “lost” jobs are
never going to come back, here or from anywhere else, with or without
Bernie Sanders, or the return of Malcolm X or Leon Trotsky.

Susan Sarandon, the well
known actress, said a few months back that a Donald Trump presidency
would likely speed up the “revolution.” Yes, we workers will all
unite and storm the Winter Palace. We could though most definitely
get noticeable change, but it will not be the kind that we want, and
the majority of us will not be able to ride out the storm on the
island of Majorca.

It's so hard and unfair

Yes, yes we did not get
Bernie, we don't like Hillary, even though she's not remotely the
devil incarnate that our 21st century Jay Goulds want
Americans to believe. And once again the so-called white working
class is mad because they've been duped and manipulated for, er ...
well ... since the beginning of our republic, but Trump tells it like
it is, and what about and so forth … imagine not standing for the
National Anthem … what's climate change....

The original Populists got
it right in the beginning: they knew it was about fearlessness,
organizing and an education campaign, which was a full-time job with
dignity. It's unfortunate we're having difficulty understanding this
in 2016.

Monday, September 05, 2016

Tug on anything at all and
you'll find it connected to everything else in the universe.

(John Muir,
environmentalist, preservationist and known in the U.S. as the
“Father of the National Parks,” 1838-1914)

In the beginning

At the present time, with
7.2 billion self-absorbed humans wandering around on the Earth, we're
probably at least 4 billion over the carrying capacity of the planet
to support all life, sustain itself and insure a viable ecosystem.
Simply put, our technology has easily outstripped our evolutionary
development. We Homo-sapiens have just barely climbed down from the
trees and begun our cautious journey across the savanna.

But as hope springs eternal
in the minds of us humans, there are a few faint signs for cautious
optimism in a handful of locations on the planet. There are
indications that where there is good governance and control of
corruption there is some decrease in environmental pressures. As
well, regions of high urbanization may have positive effects in that
housing and infrastructure needs are not spread across the larger
landscape. This is the good news.

The bad news is that at the
present time more than 70 percent of Earth's eco-regions have shown a
large increase in their human footprint. For those interested in some
of the specifics a good place to begin is a study in NatureCommunications.

Being anything you want to
be

Of course it's in the realm
of possibility that a Silicon Valley billionaire will come up with a
product to save all of us in the nick of time or some software
engineer in Mumbai, India will create the "miracle code or maybe
an obscure scientist in Shanghai, China will transform the primitive
Limbic system in the brain, allowing us to make a “quantum leap”
into the 21st century.

Last but most certainly not
least the Kurzweillian-phantasmagorical-transhuman-cum-cyborg,
brought to us by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, could arrive at the last
possible moment and save the planet.

More than likely, however,
there will be no techno-fix, no Libertarian John Gault galloping in
on his unicorn, and most assuredly no bronze-age invisible sky god
that will make the bad things go away.

This is the way the world
ends.

This is the way the world
ends.

This is the way the world
ends.

Not with a bang but a
whimper.

(From The Hollow Men by
T.S. Eliot)

The world is this way

Excluding the Syrian
apocalypse of course at the present time … well, possibly Somalia,
maybe Sudan, and yes Libya, and how can we forget Iraq … actually
most of the Arab world in general to be fair. Then there is
Afghanistan maybe Pakistan in South and Central Asia, the former
Soviet republics and those island nations sinking beneath the sea
because of rising sea levels, and....

Asia is where the action is
today. In Southeast Asia Indonesia is destroying its rainforests as
fast as possible to create more and more palm oil plantations, the
ingredient that's used by the snack manufacturers and personal care
products and cosmetics, among others. Greed, corruption and human
ignorance make everything that much easier of course—anywhere.

Moving up to Northeast Asia,
Japan's aging population is continuing to practice its cultural
cuisine. It's a sideshow in the global scheme of things but a telling
commentary on humankind. In addition to the hunting of whales for,
er, scientific purposes, there is the annual bloodbath festival that
may have been going on for a thousand years. Dolphins are rounded up
in a cove, the “prettiest” sold to aquariums and the rest clubbed
to death for the meat.

Zhonggou—The Middle
Kingdom

China right now, with its
rapidly increasing economic and military might and strict
authoritarianism, has perhaps become the tarnished gold standard for
much of the world. Its overriding historical imperative, in addition
to the reinvention of some modern day Middle Kingdom, seems to be the
creation of a vast global plantation, sort of an updated 16th
and 17th century European mercantilism. Africa and South
America are its current targets and the ends are sure to justify any
possible means for the billionaire technocrats who run the “peoples
republic.”

One of the grand Chinese
proposals is to build a 3,300 mile-long railway line through the
Amazon rainforest to access soya plantations and mining regions, a
potential environmental disaster of monumental proportions. *

China single-handedly may be
responsible for the extinction of numerous wildlife throughout the
world, perhaps the best known example being the elephant, a keystone
species, hunted for its ivory and other body parts including its feet
that are cut off and used for stools by the wealthy in every sink
hole across the planet.

This is the way the world
ends. But perhaps not.

NEXT: Chasing the carnival
in the U.S., 2016

* Amazon's forests hold
approximately 90-140 tons of carbon, around 9-14 years of current
global, annual human induced carbon emissions.

Google+ Followers

About Me

"We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes--something known only to her and to the mountains." (Aldo Leopold, "Thinking Like a Mountain")
"We are the rich. We own America. We got it, God knows how, but we intend to keep it." (Frederick Townsend Martin, 19th century plutocrat)